Politicians may have spent much of the federal election campaign promising action on the environment but, in the meantime, businesses throughout Australia have been busy reducing their environmental footprint.
Examples include a paint, render and coating systems company slashing its water needs, another that has a system for reprocessing toxic waste from aluminium into usable material and a major bank reducing its electricity needs.
Bob Cameron, co-founder of Gold Coast-based Rockcote Enterprises which makes paints and textured coatings, says he was inspired to reduce his plant’s water needs when he calculated that up to 10 times the amount of water it used fell on the site every year.
Rockcote received a grant of $76,000 to install a rainwater harvesting and treatment system to replace the company’s mains water consumption.
He says that besides the rainwater system, the company recycles water used in the “wash out" part of the manufacturing process, which is about one third of the company’s consumption.
Once cleaned, the water is used again, but is then discharged to avoid a build-up of trace chemicals. However, it is discharged through use in the toilets.
Even the material cleaned from the wash-out water is put to use as a filler in a concrete-like material used to make part of a line of wood-fired pizza stoves which Rockcote also makes.
When scrap aluminium is remelted in a furnace, salt and potash are also added to act as flux and to increase process efficiency.
Once the molten aluminium has been poured off, what’s left over is aluminium salt slag.
That material used to go to a landfill, but the Environmental Protection Authority has since designated it a hazardous material.
The Macquarie process converts that toxic waste into aluminium, a mixture of salt and potash and aluminium oxide, all of which can be reused.
Macquarie Harbour director Ben Meade says MHM’s operations in Victoria treated all of the aluminium salt slag produced in Australia under contracts with
At the other end of the corporate scale from MHM and Rockcote is ANZ, which has been working to reduce the electricity it uses, in part by making its use of computers more efficient and improving energy efficiency in its buildings.
A release from the company says it made 400 servers redundant and centralised the rest into dedicated server centres.
In addition it has installed “smart meters" in office buildings to change the heating, cooling and lighting systems at the bank’s call centre in South Melbourne.
The Australian Financial Review